INSTANCES/in the light of…TILMAN
Fondation Herman Krikhaar – Salernes
Article publié sur http ://performarts.net
Insérer sur ce renvoi ligne 4 le lien hypertexte :
http://www.performarts.net/performarts/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3490:tilman&catid=13:expo&Itemid=11
La Fondation Herman Krikhaar à Salernes, dans le Var, propose du 28.05 au 19.06.2022 une exposition intitulée INSTANCES / in the light of TILMAN, donnant à découvrir deux nouvelles séries de Painting Objects intitulées STREAMERS et MOVEMENTS 1-10, réalisées par cet artiste d’origine allemande « tombé dans la marmite » du Bahaus dès son plus jeune âge. (1)
Le travail de Tilman s’inscrit dans la mouvance de l’Art Non-objectif et plus précisément de l’Art Réductif. Véritable exploration des champs de perception de la lumière, il s’affirme dans la durée telle une enquête approfondie sur les potentialités et les attributs créatifs de cette « lumière [qui] peint le monde » et de la spatialité qu’elle révèle.
Son œuvre est constitué de ce que l’artiste lui-même qualifie d’ « objets peints plutôt que de véritables peintures ». Et pour l’appréhender, Tilman nous enjoint de l’aborder hors de toute préoccupation d’aspect formel – condition sine qua non pour ajuster notre ouverture d’esprit à une immersion dans son travail. Ces objets peints peuvent alors être considérés comme les véhicules d’une exploration de l’espace architectural, comme des outils à portée de main, des instruments visuels jouant la partition d’une compréhension expérimentale et ouvrant sur une connaissance empirique au-delà du périmètre de la simple perception cognitive.
Dans ce processus visuel, le matériau BLANC devient un facteur important, comme le déclare l’artiste : « les couleurs et les soi-disant non-couleurs ne sont que des nuances de lumière attachées à notre capacité à traiter la vision spectrale... Pour moi, elles présentent des matériaux - plutôt que de simples nuances de couleurs -, sans hiérarchie ni connotations. Outre ces attributs, le blanc matériel signifie l’idée d’espace ou de spatialité, l’éther, le vide… Le vide qui veut être comblé par le spectateur. L’espace, peint en blanc, se constitue en refuge pour la réflexion et l’interconnexion – l’interspace - permettant au spectateur d’interagir et de participer au mouvement du temps/lumière et ainsi de trouver sa place dans le dialogue donné, et au-delà. »
La série STREAMERS (En français banderoles) introduit un jeu sur les formes flottantes. Librement basées sur une autre forme rectangulaire, ces formes libres défient les frontières de la perception opérant habituellement à travers nos décors visuels traditionnels (rectangulaires, verticaux ou horizontaux, carrés, etc.). Et ce faisant, elles évoquent le mouvement, l’intemporalité, le flux et l’infini.
Les MOVEMENTS 1 A 10 quant à eux, sont proposés en tant qu’invitation à une démarche exploratoire de l’espace architectural participant d’un jeu sur les possibilités construites.
Ces objets incitent à s’approprier l’acte de voir et à le comprendre comme une véritable expérience sensorielle : il s’agit là de voir vraiment ces MOVEMENTS finement calibrés et les spatialités raffinées déclinées à l’unisson entre leurs plans multicouches avec des éléments de teintes subtiles vibrant comme un corps en mouvement… Au final, une invite à interagir réellement dans le processus de perception avec son propre corps et ses potentialités physiques … En bref, à voir et à avoir l’air de travers !
Catherine Mathis
D’après des propos de Tilman recueillis le 20 Avril 2022
voir notre article Tilman – Du bonheur d’être artiste insérer lien ici sur le titre de l’article cité)
http://www.performarts.net/performarts/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3492:tilmanartiste&catid=10:entretien&Itemid=14
TILMAN
DU BONHEUR D’ETRE ARTISTE
Article publié sur httpp://performarts.net (Inclure ici le lien intertexte ) http://www.performarts.net/performarts/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3492:tilmanartiste&catid=10:entretien&Itemid=14
Né en 1959 à Munich, Tilman est un artiste jovial. A l’inverse de Cioran, être né n’est pas pour lui un inconvénient et sa réjouissance de vivre pleinement sa vie d’artiste est de tous les instants. Mais sous ses airs débonnaires, bienheureux et placides se cache un magicien prestigieux. Car Tilman, immergé dès l’enfance dans l’univers fascinant du Bauhaus, tel un improbable Obélix tombé dans la marmite de l’Art Non Objectif, a développé une puissance créatrice considérable et est devenu maître ès lumière. La lumière… Encore et toujours la lumière, éternelle problématique de l’art. La lumière, « ce phénomène fondamental du monde » qui, selon Johannes Itten, « nous révèle par les couleurs l’esprit et l’âme vivante de ce monde ».
Mettre ici visuels TIL_1
Depuis des années, elle est la quête de Tilman, son doux tourment, sa compagne, sa souffrance parfois et sa jubilation souvent.… Il la poursuit, la saisit et la capture dans des couleurs éblouissantes, il la dompte, la caresse, la magnifie, la libère et la laisse se répandre dans des tonalités mouvantes jusque dans l’intimité de ses structures et de ses compositions en trois dimensions. Elle s’insinue de toutes parts dans les interstices de ses Houses of colors, Stacks et autres Splices, les anime, souligne leurs contours et se réfléchit dans leurs angles pour y dévoiler des perspectives inédites et toute une intériorité que le spectateur est invité à explorer, telle une métaphore de ses propres contrées intérieures. Mais si le regard est flatté d’emblée par la fraîcheur des couleurs et la sobriété des monochromes, il ne s’agit là que des prémisses d’un jeu de séduction auquel le regardeur pourra se prêter à l’envi. Au risque annoncé de glisser de l’une de ses réminiscences à l’autre, sur de somptueuses tonalités acidulées, jusqu’aux confins de sa mémoire. Et d’atteindre peut-être à l’essentiel, au terme d’un périple dans un univers de perceptions où « les couleurs sont des idées originelles ».
Mettre ici visuels TIL_2
Car « l’esprit et l’âme vivante de ce monde » évoqués par Itten, Tilman les rend intelligibles dans ses épures joyeuses, avec une efficience et une lucidité saisissantes nuancées de poésie et de sensualité délicate, sans jamais donner dans l’emphase. Et s’il parvient à les restituer avec un tel talent, c’est qu’il sait tout d’abord les appréhender pleinement, dans une attitude d’ouverture à son environnement qui active ses potentialités de sujet tourné vers l’altérité. Lors de ses pérégrinations urbaines, les multiples expériences sensorielles qui ne cessent de se renouveler déposent successivement dans sa conscience des strates d’empreintes de formes et de couleurs. Et c’est dans ce fonds inépuisable qu’il va extraire le matériau singulier de ses œuvres, déjà synthétisé par les résurgences mémorielles qui impulsent son geste créateur. Le travail de Tilman ne s’élabore donc pas en suivant in extenso un processus défini à l’avance mais se développe en fonction de ses interactions avérées ou potentielles avec le lieu auquel il va s’intégrer. Et s’il fait la part belle à l’intuition, il n’est pas pour autant départi de rigueur.
Mettre ici visuels TIL_3
Bien que Tilman inscrive ses recherches dans les prolongements du Néoplasticisme, du Bauhaus et de De Stijl et qu’il les déploie dans la ligne conceptuelle initiée par Mondrian et Théo Van Doesburg, ce visionnaire réjoui en a franchi les impasses. Ainsi, ses Stacks semblent affirmer l’esprit épuré du Hard-Edge lorsqu’ils sont contemplés frontalement mais perdent instantanément leurs allures de monochrome dès qu’ils sont abordés latéralement. Vus de travers, ils deviennent des œuvres hybrides en trois dimensions qui, à ressortir encore de la peinture, empruntent néanmoins à la sculpture et à l’architecture et inaugurent un dialogue entre la forme et la couleur.
Tilman s’amuse ainsi de nos a priori avec humour et déjoue nos certitudes avec élégance. Sans crainte ni contrainte, avec la virtuosité et la joie communicative de celui qui sait aller là où rien n’est convenu … Tilman, magicien de la lumière ? Assurément. Mais aussi praticien hors norme d’un art en résonnance avec la vie quotidienne. Et véritable architecte du dialogue et de la mise en lien…
SVP si possible mettre ici visuels TILMAN_4
Tilman répond à nos questions :
Catherine Mathis: Quel a été ton itinéraire ? Tu as commencé par la photographie ?
Tilman : Oui, mais avant cela, j’avais été sensibilisé au Bauhaus dès mon plus jeune âge par à mon père. Il travaillait dans l’édition à Munich et était aussi peintre amateur. J’ai grandi à la campagne et j’y ai reçu une éducation à double orientation : la nature et le Bauhaus où il m’emmenait tous les week-ends et pendant les vacances. C’est comme cela que j’ai développé très tôt mon propre univers. Et cela m’a accompagné toute ma vie. A quinze ans, je me suis vraiment intéressé à la photographie, celle du Bauhaus bien sûr, de Man Ray, etc., et c’est seulement après que j’ai commencé à peindre car, finalement, j’ai décidé que la photographie, ce n’était pas pour moi. Elle manifeste un moment du temps, c’est une documentation sur une seconde, elle s’arrête là. Je faisais de la photographie très expérimentale, dans l’esprit du Bauhaus, de l’abstraction. Mais très vite s’est posée à moi la question de la lumière. On ne peut pas photographier la lumière. La photographie, ce n’est pas la peinture. J’ai fait mes études d’art à Munich, à la Fachoberschule für Gestaltung und Design puis à l’Akademie der Bildenden Künste et j’ai eu comme professeur le peintre Günter Fruhtrunk, un caractère vraiment fort qui parlait plus de politique et de philosophie que d’art… Jusqu’à ce qu’il décide d’arrêter cela parce que, avait-t-il fini par dire, « la philosophie, c’est la mort de la peinture » ! Il s’est suicidé quelques années plus tard… Ses peintures sont vraiment magnifiques !
C. M. : Y a-t’il eu d‘autres artistes qui ont exercé une influence particulière sur ton travail ?
T. : Chacun doit trouver son propre langage mais, évidemment, lorsqu’on fait des études d’art, on subit de fortes influences. Pour ma part, ça a été celle du peintre vénitien Emilio Vedova. Quant tu travailles, beaucoup de questions surgissent en permanence. Dans la réalisation de mes travaux abstraits à l’école d’art, le geste, le mouvement, la couleur, l’expression, tout me questionnait sans cesse et les recherches de Vedova, l’énergie et la dynamique qui s’en dégagent, m’ont aidé à m’orienter par rapport à ce que je voulais dire avec l’abstraction et la couleur. Et puis, j’ai travaillé dans une galerie importante à Munich qui exposait Palermo, Nam June Paik, Sol Lewitt, etc. et cela a sans doute été encore plus déterminant pour moi que l’école d’art. La première exposition que j’ai installée était de Fred Sandback. J’étais vraiment jeune mais je guettais tout ce qui arrivait et le dépôt de la galerie a été ma véritable école d’art. Dans ma peinture, j’ai cherché longtemps comment faire pour exprimer la lumière. Finalement, je suis arrivé à la conclusion que cela n’est pas possible. J’ai pratiqué pendant des années la peinture gestuelle sur toile, à Munich d’abord, puis à Berlin, à Cologne et ensuite à New York pendant douze ans. Et c’est à Bruxelles, après mon retour des U.S.A, que j’ai enfin trouvé comment résoudre la question que me posait la lumière : Il me fallait la traiter par le biais de la couleur. Pas la couleur envisagée comme base théorique mais la couleur en tant que support et expression de la lumière J’ai arrêté la peinture sur toile et j’ai commencé à travailler avec la troisième dimension en réalisant mes premières structures. Et là, il s’est passé quelque chose de très important. Un tableau, c’est statique. En trois dimensions c’est différent, avec la lumière qui change tout au long de la journée et le fait que l’on doive se déplacer pour voir les différentes facettes de la composition. Cela m’a donné la possibilité de jouer avec la « physicalité » de la lumière et avec l’espace. Mais cela s’est fait pas à pas.
C. M. : C’est ainsi que tu en es arrivé à tes Painted Objects, tes Stacks et tes Houses of colors ?
T. : Oui, c’est encore de la peinture mais pas seulement. Là, il faut trouver le moyen de faire bouger le spectateur pour qu’il ne reste pas immobile en face de l’objet peint mais qu’il tourne autour, qu’il regarde ce qui se passe dedans…
Mettre ici visuel TILMAN_5l
C. M. : C’est une des lignes de force de ton travail que souligne le titre de l’exposition que tu as réalisée à Oslo en 2006, Look Awry, qui signifie à peu près « regarde de biais, de travers ».
T. :.Oui, c’est très important que le spectateur se déplace autour de l’œuvre, et pas n’importe comment. Mais tout le monde n’est pas prêt pour cela. Il y a là toute une dimension psychologique, c’est une question complexe. J’ai commencé à essayer de faire bouger les personnes en faisant une exposition à Knokke, en Belgique, intitulée White out Space, il y a une douzaine d’années, dans un espace totalement blanc. J’avais installé un profilé d’aluminium que j’avais coupé et posé au milieu de la galerie, et il n’y a qu’une petite fille qui a compris comment poser son regard ! Elle a appelé son père : « Papa, papa, regarde! Par ici, et par là ! » Et tous les gens se sont mis à bouger pour trouver différents angles de vue et regarder à l’intérieur. C’est la petite fille qui avait compris, pas les adultes ! Ça a été un moment magnifique ! Mais il y a eu une personne qui a été très fâchée que mon travail ne soit pas accroché au mur. Sans doute parce qu’elle se trouvait dans l’obligation de changer ses moyens habituels de perception !
Mettre ici visuel TILMAN_6
C. M. : Pourtant c’est tellement aérien ! Il n’y a plus de support, juste un équilibre presque immatériel d’une grande subtilité. Par exemple, dans ton Splice(2008) qui flirte joyeusement avec les roses glamour, l’humour et l’allégresse le disputent à la profondeur. Il y a tout ce qu’on ne voit presque pas qui devient très important : ces petits écarts qui changent tout, ces ouvertures infimes qui laissent apparaître d’autres couleurs et dans lesquelles le spectateur peut s’immiscer pour aller à la rencontre de son imaginaire, de sa mémoire, de son inconscient…Et apprendre à voir. Car tes structures sont une invite à une déambulation introspective mais effectivement aussi une forme de didactique, non pas théorique mais vivante, sur les ressources du regard.
T. : En tout cas, elles posent la question de la perception individuelle : on peut ou on ne peut pas voir, c’est quelque chose qu’il est difficile de diriger. Alors, plutôt que d’imposer, j’invite à essayer. Il y a l’extérieur, l’intérieur, l’air autour… Et l’espace entre tout cela a la même importance que l’objet. C’est un matériau, éphémère certes mais un matériau à part entière, comme la couleur. Ce n’est pas du bois, c’est de l’ombre, de la lumière, mais c’est un matériau aussi, et qui a autant d’importance que l’objet. A l’intérieur, il se passe plein de choses, les couleurs changent, la lumière se déplace… Mais pour voir tout cela, il faut vraiment regarder ! Il faut entrer dedans avec ses yeux, mais aussi avec son esprit, avec son âme et regarder, regarder vraiment
Si possible insérer ici visuel TILMAN_7
C. M. : Quand tu travailles, quelle part laisses-tu à l’intuition ?
T. :Je pense, et ça c’est sans doute encore une référence à ma confrontation à la photographie, que l’œil est un peu un appareil photo. Lorsque je me déplace, je regarde et je vois beaucoup de choses, des détails m’intéressent et tout cela arrive dans ma tête en l’état. Et puis, plus tard, certaines images retenues par l’œil photographique émergent, ressortent et alors je les laisse revenir et ensuite je les travaille.
C. M. : C‘est donc de tes propres archives mémorielles que surgissent les formes que tu réinventes. Et est-ce que l’aléatoire joue un rôle important dans ton travail ?
T. :Oui, le hasard a de l’importance. Il faut savoir lui faire place. Pour ce qui me concerne, il compte beaucoup. Nous parlions à l’instant de l’absence de support. Et bien, par exemple, un jour, j’arrive pour le montage d’une exposition à Bruxelles avec l’idée de suspendre des pièces aux murs et j’en pose deux au sol, contre le mur sur lequel elles devaient aller, en attendant de les fixer. Et soudain, j’ai vu qu’elles étaient à leur place ainsi et je les ai laissées comme ça, juste posées, sans les accrocher ! Le hasard peut changer le travail complètement. Poser une pièce ainsi, c’est atteindre à quelque chose de philosophique. Je suis arrivé là à un point où laisser une pièce au mur comme cela, c’est vraiment une manifestation, c’est ouvrir un cheminement philosophique dans la peinture et faire que mon travail ne soit pas figé, qu’il continue, comme la vie ! Cela montre aussi ce qu’il y a en amont et me permet d’installer mes pièces de différentes manières, selon le lieu et le moment. Certains me catégorisent comme minimaliste mais je ne crois pas que cela soit exact car je n’ai pas vraiment un système statique comme celui du minimalisme. Je ne veux pas de cela, cela ne me correspond pas.
C. M. : C’est sans doute parce que tu en as dépassé les limitations. Tu as pulvérisé les frontières de l’art réductif d’une manière très intéressante car ton travail est à la fois très sobre et extrêmement dense, riche en ouvertures de toutes sortes : picturales, oniriques, psychologiques, philosophiques... Pour le spectateur, il suffit juste de bouger un peu et ce qu’il peut voir alors est sans fin !
T. :C’est parfois difficile à accepter pour certains galeristes, historiens ou critiques d’art, qui se posent la question de comment présenter et expliquer mon travail au public. Mais peu importe. J’aime travailler ainsi le rapport entre peinture et architecture en jouant sur la flexibilité de la couleur et la réflexivité de la lumière. L’aspect théorique et philosophique, c’est intéressant, mais la philosophie, c’est aussi un ensemble de systèmes. Et, en tant qu’artiste, je ne veux pas m’enfermer dans un système. Avant tout, pour moi, l’art, c’est une raison d’être, c’est la vie. Sans art, pas de traces de la vie.
C. M. :Tu procèdes à beaucoup de réalisations in situ ?
T. : Oui, de plus en plus, et c’est très intéressant de composer avec l’espace et le lieu. Tu entres dans un univers et tu t’y intègres. Accrocher au mur, ça va bien un temps. Réagir à l’espace et à ce qui existe déjà là, c’est passer à autre chose. Mais c’est possible parce que j’ai développé cette manière de travailler. Cela me permet de sortir de l’atelier et d’accéder à une autre dimension .C’est passionnant : le monde devient l’atelier.
Si possible insérer ici visuel TILMAN
Catherine Mathis
Texte et entretien publiés en 2011 dans la revue Perform’Arts n°11
EDUCATION
1981 - Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich (DE)
1985 with Prof. Günter Fruhtrunk en Prof. Hans Baschang
1976 - Fachoberschule für Gestaltung und Design, Munich (DE)
1978
CURATOR
Founder and artistic director of d.a.c. dolce acqua arte contemporanea, Dolceacqua (IT)
Co-founder, artistic director & chief curator of CCNOA center for contemporary non-objective art Brussels (BE) 2003-2010, and freelance curator
Co-founder and artistic director of H29 Brussels (BE) 2005 - 2008
VISUAL ARTIST
SOLO EXHIBITIONS (*PUBLICATION / EDITION)
2022. INSTANCES / IN THE LIGHT OF...., Fdtn. Krikhaar, Salernes (FR)
FLEETING MOMENTS : IN TIME, Imprints Gallery, Crest (FR)
2021 WHITE OUT, Galerie Fontana, Amsterdam (NL)
SENCABANER, Galerie Michel Journiac, Université de La Sorbonne, Paris (FR), together with Antoine Perrot
2020 INFINITE VILLAGE,When I Becomes USpart I, MANIFESTA 13/Paralleles du Sud,Espace Jouenne, Marseille (FR),in collaboration with Cora von Zezschwitz, presented and organised by The (He)Artfor(He)arthrogram, Nice
INFINITE VILLAGE,When I becomes UsPart II, MANIFESTA 13/Parallel du Sud, Le 109, Nice, in collaboration with Cora von Zezschwitz, presented and organised bt The(He)artful(He)artprogram, Nice
INFINITE VILLAGETransformations, MANIFESTA 13/Parallel du Sud, Hotel Windsor, Nice in collaboration with Cora von Zezschwitz; presented and organised by The(He)artfor(He)artrogram, Nice
2019. INFINITE VILLAGE / Cabin In the Sky, Parcours dArt Avignon, Eglise des Célestins, in collaboration with Cora von Zezschwitz
INFINITE VILLAGE / Re- Adapting, Parcours DARt Sillon, Saou, France, in collaboration with Cora von Zezschwitz
INFINITE VILLAGE / Interspace, M-17 Art Center, Kiev (Ukraine, in collaboration with Cora von Zezschwitz
INFINITE VILLAGE / Inside/Outside, A. FARM, Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam, in collaboration with Cora von Zezschwitz
2018 Colors In Space, Galerie Fontana, Amsterdam
New Works, Concept Space, Shibukawa, Japan
INFINITE VILLAGE, DAC, Dolceacqua, Italy, in collaboration with Cora von Zezschwitz
INFINITE VILLAGE/RAW/ABANDONEMENT, 36 Triennale Grenchen,Switzerland, in collaboration with Cora von Zezschwitz, curator: Reto Emch
INFINITE VILLAGE, Il Cielo e blu et gli uccelli attraversano in volo, Convento dei Gesuiti, Venice, Italy, in collaboration with Cora von Zezschwitz
2017 Re-Structuring, IUVA, Venice (IT), a collaboration with Cora Von Zezschwitz (CN/FR), proposed by Prof. Renato Bocchi
nella luce che lo vedo, MATtam, Mantova (IT)
Un-spaced, N.O.S., Tulette (FR), a collaboration with Cora Von Zezschwitz (CN/FR)
2016 The image is in your mind & Reflex Wall, Raygun Projects, Toowoomba, Australia
Alexandra Lawson Gallery, Toowoomba, QS (AUS)0
2015 Reflektorium (Voyage au bout de la nuit), 13. Lyon Biennale / Resonance_Focus, organized by Galerie Tator & Snap Projects, Lyon (FR) *
Cosi Come Stanno Le Cose, d.a.c., Dolceacqua (IT)
2014 L’Achive D’Un Artiste Inconnu et D’Àutres Propositions, SNAP Projects, Lyon (FR) *
IMAGELIGHTSOUNDSPACE/PROJECT, Kunstverein Moenchengladbach MMIII, Moenchengladbach (DE), concept: Tilman *
2013/14 Si Tu Vois Quelque Chose … Observations / Transformations, Galerie Djeziri-Bonn_Linard Editions
2013 Radio Vallebona / Transmission #1, Minusspace, Brooklyn NY (US) *
Vis-à-Vis / New York – Marseille, La GAD, Galerie Arnaud Deschin, Marseille (FR)
2012 Tilman’s Flats, Galerie Eric Linard, La Garde Adhemar (FR)
Mix 3 / 2 Galerie Rob de Vries, Haarlem (NL)
2011 Painted Obje(c)ts Ambigus, Linard*Langsdorff, Paris (FR)
Mondriaanhuis, Amersfort (NL)
2010 New Works, Concept Space, Shibukawa (JP)
2009 NYC 37/9 and Other Dysfunctional Properties, P.I.T., Tilburg (NL)
Freeforms, Galerie Eric Linard, La Garde Adhemar (FR) *
House of Colours, Galerie Soardi, Nice (FR) *
SUBSTANCE (For Julian), The Suburban, Chicago (US)
Galerie 69, Graz (AT / with Clemens Hollerer)
2008 12 Colors for Brussels 2, Kartell Flagship Store, Brussels (BE)
Details, McBRIDE Fine Art, Antwerp (BE / with Ward Denys, BE) / curator: Petra Bungert (DE)
RM 103, Auckland (NZ)
Peleton, Sydney (AU) June
MKD - Dum Umeni / House of Art, Ceske Budejovice (CZ) *
2007 12 Colors for Brussels, CCNOA, Brussels (BE)
Sonja Roesch Gallery, Houston TX (US / with Alma Tischler, DE)
Lost & Found, MINUSSPACE, Brooklyn NY (US)
2006 Look Awry, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (NO) * / curator: Kjell Bjorgeengen (NO)
Gridworks, Konsortium, Düsseldorf (DE)
2005 andenken, Stiftung für konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen (DE)
MOP Projects, Sydney (AU)
SNO Sydney Non-Objective, Sydney (AU) (with Kyle Jenkins, AU)
2004 Galerie CD, Tielt (BE)
E-472C-BSL, Hebel _121, Basel (CH)
2003 F218B-BXL, CCNOA, Brussels (BE) *
AMS:White, PS, Amsterdam (NL) *
White-Out-Studio, Knokke-Heist (BE) *
Proximus, Bonn (DE) (with Joan Waltemath, US)
2000 Transforms & Constellations, CCNOA, Brussels (BE) *
PS, Amsterdam (NL)
1999 Petra Bungert Projects, Brussels (BE)
1997 Petra Bungert Gallery, New York NY (US)
1996 Galerie Köstring/Maier, Munich (DE / with Solveig Adelsdottir, ISL)
1995 Petra Bungert Gallery, New York NY (US)
1992 Galerij Annik Ketele, Antwerpen (BE) *
Galerij Transit, Leuven (BE)
1990 Galerij Transit, Leuven (BE / with Josef Zuteltge, US)
1986 Galerie Nitsche, Munich (DE) *
Raumpunkt, Berlin (DE)
Galerie im Ottoblock, Munich (DE)
1985 Staatstheater Darmstadt (DE / with Reinhard Tischler)
Bremm, Köln (DE / with Reinhard Tischler) *
Darmstädter Sezession Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt (DE)
1984 Realitätenbüro, Berlin (DE)
Galerie am Rosengässchen, Weiden (DE / with Reinhard Tischler, DE)
1983 Lucky Strike, New York NY (US)
249 Eldridge, New York NY (US)
{{GROUP EXHIBITIONS (*PUBLICATION / EDITION)}}
2022. ART AMOUR FOU..Laetitia Yalon, Maison Pelsgrins, Brussels (B)
Organised By Nathalie Yalon
2021 COVIMETRY, Ely Gallery of Art, New Haven, CN (USA), curated by Mark Starel&Susan Shutan
SCULPTURE EN FETE, Fdtn. Villa DArtris, Ile-sur-la-Sorgue (FR)
2020. #1 Kontruktivist, on-live exhibition curated by Erdem Korroglu (TK)
2019. CCNOA/DAC a shared Experience, M-17 Art Center, Kiev (UA)
curated by Serhyi Popov& Tilman
Untitled, Minusspace, Brooklyn, N.Y. (USA)
20/20, Multiple Art, Zuerich (SUI)
20 years Hebel, HEBEL-121, Basel (SUI)
1st Biennale of Reductive Art, Sydney (AUS)
organised. y Dr.Billy Gruner
2018. Infinite Worlds / Infinite Possibilities, USB Gallery, Toowoomba, (AUS)
curated. by Prof. Kyle Jenkins
2017 Au Hasard, Villa Balthazar, Valence (FR), organised by SNAP Projects, Lyon
100 years De Stijl , Achmea Building, Leiden (NL), organised by IS-Projects, Leiden (NL)
The Doesburg Project Amsterdam Concret, Amsterdam (NL), organised by Galerie AGNS/Billy Gruner
Wallpaintings III, Centre Culturel Marcel Pagnol, Fos-sur-mer (FR), organised by Yifat Gat & Jasper van der Graaf
Reichwein Tilman Zoderer , Multiple Art & Editions, Zurich (CH)
In White, Galeria Graze, Warschau (PL) organised by Marzena Paczkowska
ONE, Kiev Non Objective, Kiev (UA)
2016 Sandwiches, Cartel BKK, Bangkok (TH), curated by Gyles Ryder
MAKESPACE/Raw in: Run Run Run, Villa Arson, Nice (FR), organized by La Station, Nice (FR)
Julian Dashper & Friends, PS Projects, Amsterdam (NL)
Sculpture en partage, Fondation Villa Dartris, Ile-sur-la Sorgue (FR)
WOPS and Small Objects, Red Door Gallery / University of Queensland, Toowoomba (AU)
Works on paper, Artotheque Miramas en collaboartion avec Look&Listen, Miramas (FR)
Works on paper, Minusspace, Brooklyn, NY (US)
Black & White, Transmitter, Brooklyn, NY (US), organized by Look&Listen, Saint Chamas (FR)
2015 Architecture et Sculpture, Fondation Villa Datris, Isle-sur-Sorge (FR) *
Colors and Lines Are Not Lies , West Projects, Sydney & Red Door Gallery, Toowoomba (AU), organized by Kyle Jenkins
Snap Projects & La Quinccaillerie, Brussels (BE), organized by Snap Projects, Lyon (FR)
2014 Shelf Show, Tom Christoffersen Galeri, Copenhagen (DK), curated by Torgny Wilcke
On/Out Work, SNAP Projects, Lyon (FR)
30/30-IAP #4, ABContemporary Galerie, Zuerich (CH), curated by CCNOA
Mulitple Art, Zuerich (CH) with Marguerite Hersberger und Oliver Schuss
30/30-IAP #5, N.O.I., Dolceacqua (IT), organised by CCNOA/D.A.C.
MIX 3, Galerie Rob de Vries, Haarlem (NL)
PS 1999-2014, PS Amsterdam, Amsterdam (NL), curated by Jan van der Ploeg
Et Que L’Aventure Continue ... Collection Philippe Delaunay, Musee d`art, Bernay (FR) *
Dei colori, D.A.C. Dolceacqua (IT), organised by D.A.C.
#01, Cabane Georgina, A.K&N Projects, Marseille (FR), organized by Jerome Chaubaud
Noir & Blanc, Look & Listen, St Chamas (FR), organized by Yifat Gat
Autour de dessin, Galerie Djeziri-Bonn, Paris (FR)
Een Genuanceerd Bild, KP 37, Haarlem (NL), organised by Rob de Vries
2013 The smaller The bigger, Rob de Vries Gallery & Projects, Haarlem (NL)
A German-Russian Dialog, The City Center of Fine Art. Novosibirsk (RU), curator: Yana Strizhevskaya *
Romantic Duo, Europride Park / Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille (FR) curator: Arnaud Deschin (La GAD)
Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA (US)
2012 Supervues 012, Hotel Burrhus, Vaison la Romaine (FR) / presented by La GAD - Galerie Arnaud Deschin, Marseille (FR)
Reserve sans Reserve, Galerie Eric Linard, La Garde Adhemar (FR)
30/30 Image Archive Project, Moins Un, Paris (FR)
Au delà du tableau, Le 19 CRAC, Montbéliard (FR) * / curator: Philippe Cyroulnik (FR)
All I Need, Galerie 6b, Elingen (BE)
Mix op locatie, Castellum Aqvae, Bloemendael (NL)
Colorific, Ecole des Arts, Braine-L’Alleud (BE) * / curator: Petra Bungert (DE)
Acchrochage Sonja Roesch Gallery, Houston (US)
Minusspace en Oaxaca: Panorama de 31 artistas internacionales Instituto de Artes Graficas de Oaxaca (IAGO) (MX)
2011 Plane Speaking, McKenzie Fine Art, New York, NY (US)
Back to Basics, Pont-Le-Claix (FR) / curator: Roland Orepük (FR)
Collection Sanders, Wereeldmuseum, Rotterdam (NL)
Schnittstellen, IS Projects, Leiden (NL)
Sugarmountain 2, Galerie van den Berge, Goes (NL) / curator: Clary Stolte (NL)
Columna 1 – Lyon Biennial 2011 Satellite, Vienne & Chasse-sur Rhone (FR) / curator: Paul Raguenes (FR)
The Pulse T’Herlinkxhuis, Beersel (BE) / curator: Piki Verschueren (BE)
The 2011 Light Space Project, Gallery SEESCAPE, Muang, Chiang Mai (TH) / curator: Giles Ryder (AU)
z.t., Galerie Rob de Fries Projecten, Haarlem (NL)
2010 Composite Visions, CAN Centre d’art de Neuchatel (CH)
My Eyes Keep Me in Trouble, La Station Nice (FR)
With Your Eyes Only CCNOA @ YUM, Brussels (BE)
10 ans d’art contemporain, Mission Culturelle de France, Beyrouth (LBN) & touring / organized by Edition Eric Linard (FR)
Collection, Musee d’Art Moderne, Neuchatel (CH)
From New Abstraction to Post Formalism - SNO 61 SNO, Sydney (AU) / curators: Rhonda Davis & Camilla Tellez (AU)
ÌS comes to SNO - SNO 62 SNO, Sydney (AU) / co-organized by IS Leiden (NL)
Multiple Art, Kunsthaus Zoffingen (CH)
Julian Dashper (1960-2009): It Is Life, Minusspace, New York (US) / organized by Minus Space, Victoria Munro (US) & Jan van der Ploeg (NL)
Accrochage, Galerie Leonard, Graz (AT)
UND 6, Schwartz Gallery, London (UK)
Darf es mal wieder weniger sein? pp Projects, Hamburg (DE)
2009 Accrochage, Sonja Roesch Gallery, Houston (US)
PS 1999-2009, Kunstruimte09, Groningen (NL)
PS 1999-2009, PS, Amsterdam (NL)
Rashomon, Petit Port, Leiden (NL)
mypainting.nu, Lokaal01, Breda (NL)
UND 5 (Voila), Maison Abandonnee / Villa Carmeline, Nice (FR)
A la pleine tube ... Galerie Guy Ledune / art & co, Brussels (BE)
We Go far ... And Way Back, Show Gallery Staten Island NY (US)
Concrete Now! Introducing PS, H-I-C-A, Dalcrombie (UK) / / curator: Jan van der Ploeg (NL)
Rondo Abstract 09, Atelier Rondo, Graz (AT)
Accrochage, McBride Fine Arts, Antwerp (BE)
With Your Eyes Only, Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz (AT)
2008 Minusspace @ PS 1/ MOMA, Brooklyn NY (US) / curator: Phong Bui (US)
Antwerp Sculpture, Antwerp (BE) organized by the MUHKA & the Middelheim Museum
UND 4, croxhapox, Gent (BE)
i.e., Toowoomba (AU)
Subset, Conical Inc, Melbourne (AU)
My Eyes Keep Me In Trouble, SCA Sydney, (AU) & The Physics Room, Christchurch (NZ)
Hello/Goodbye, Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem (NL) / curator: Martijn Lucas Smit (NL)
Under the surface, RC Ruimte, Ijmuiden (NL) / curator: J.M. Voskuil (NL)
Revisited (Tragicommedy in 7 Acts), La Salle de Bains/CAC, Lyon (FR) / concept: Dan Walsh (US)
2007 minimalpop, Arti en Amicitiae, Amsterdam (NL)
Pas de soucis, NOS Non Objectif Sud, Tulette (FR) *
Composite Realities, CCP, Melbourne (AU) / curator: David Thomas (AU)
Shifting trends: Transitions of intuitive abstraction, S.N.O., Sydney (AU) / curator: Kyle Jenkins (AU)
Und Jetzt, IS, Leiden & Galerie Le Petit Port, Leiden (NL) *
2006 UND, Chiellerie Gallery, Amsterdam (NL)
Multiple Art & Originale, Galerie Elisabeth Staffelbach, Aarau (CH) & Galerie im Schützenhaus, Zoffingen (CH)
Minimalisms, Gallery W 52, New York NY (US)
Painted Objects, CCNOA, Brussels (BE)
Collected/Uncollected, S.N.O., Sydney (AU)
2step, Kunstnernes HUS, Oslo (NO) & UH University Galleries, Hertfordshire (UK)
TAKE OFF, Hebel_121, Basel (CH)
Early Fabricated, Tracer Projects, Toowoomba (AUS) & CCNOA, Brussels (BE)
Deleget/Levine/Tilman, Sonia Roesch Gallery, Houston TX (US)
Concrete Zaken, Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem (NL)
Panatteri/Tilman, Counterpoint, Melbourne (AU)
Double Exposure, CCNOA, Brussels (BE)
2005 Minimalpop, Galerie Filles du calvaire, Brussels (BE) & Paris (FR)
Drawings, SmithAnderson Editions, Palo Alto, CA (US)
Galerie de multiple, Paris (FR)
Group Show II, MOP, Sydney (AU)
N.O.T.3, The Office, Toowoomba (AU)
Early Fabricated, Peletone, Sydney (AUS) & ocular lab, Brunswick (AU)
Painted Objects, PS, Amsterdam (NL)
Means without End, Guild & Greyshkul, New York NY (US)
2004 minimalpop, Florence Lynch, New York NY (US)
Multipli + Originali, Arte Contemporeana Ammann, Locarno (CH)
molti multipli CCNOA, Brussels (BE)
Galerie de multiple, Paris (FR)
2003 Konkret-Privat, Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung, Bonn (DE)
24, Eugene Binder, Marfa TX (US)
Small Colors, Eva Mack, Stuttgart (DE)
Multiples and Originals, Galerie Zimmermannshaus, Brugg (CH)
Raid Projects, Los Angeles CA (US) *
Images of desire 3, Winston Hotel, Amsterdam (NL)
Independence, South London Gallery, London (UK)
2002 Images of desire 2, Winston Hotel, Amsterdam (NL)
2001 WOP, PS, Amsterdam (NL)
New Minimal, Galerie Markus Richter, Berlin (DE)
Multiples, Ecritvain, Brussels (BE)
Hier en Nu / Ici Maintenant, Tour & Taxis, Brussels (BE)
2000 From Rags to Riches, Fondation de la Tapisserie des Arts du Tissu et des Arts mureaux, Tournai (BE) *
1999 Festivale St. Martin, Tourinnes-La-Grosse (BE) *
1998 9 + 1, Petra Bungert Projects, Brussels (BE)
1997 Invitational, Edward Hopper House, Nyack NY (US)
1996 New Acquisitions, Sammlung für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Bayerische Landesbank International, Luxemburg (LU) *
Tinseltower, Clocktower, New York NY (US)
1995 Introductions, Robert McClain & Co., Houston TX (US)
1994 Interwoven Space, Delta Axis CCA, Memphis TN (US)
1990 Transit @ Handelskantoor, Handelskantoor, Leuven (BE)
1984 10 Positionen zur Zeit, Galerie der Künstler, BBK, Munich (DE) *
Realitätenbüro, Berlin (DE)
1983 Asymmetrisch Assymmetrisch, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich (DE)
Freestyle or The art of surfing the abstract wave
Tilman’s latest monochromes, whether one-off or in series, have an askew look to them; they would appear to have broken with geometric abstraction, with the purism of primary colours and with self-reference. While there is a hint of the shaped canvases of Ellsworth Kelly, in fact the syncopated silhouettes and acid tones of these Freeforms spontaneously evoke the dynamic lines and pure colours of the distorted American cartoon images of the mid-fifties.
In other recent works Tilman appears to have distanced himself from the tradition of constructivism and minimalism with which he is often associated. In 13.08 (Pink Champagne) (2008), although the rectangular structure is maintained, the bottom right-hand module of this light pink quadriptych sinks inwards towards the wall, creating a discontinuity reminiscent of the virtual circuit of a video game. The superposed elements of 14.08 (Urban Structure I) (2008) are reminiscent of a composition from the early days of neo-plasticism but the chromatic impurity of the white dispels any doubt. The irony peaks in Splice (2008): two hybrid monochromes precariously propped up one against the other have no wall support and no front view as such, as they are painted both front and back, one of them looking rather like a sandwich filled with slices of paint. Worth noting ’en passant’ is the title, which is derived from the film editing term ’to splice’. And what about the series Stacks that uses the same principle as Donald Judd in his works with the same title but inflicts on them sugary tones and a pleasurable sense of accumulation verging on disorder?
So yes, Tilman glides coolly over the shadow cast by modernism, drawing free forms, supposedly abstract but always reinvented. If he avoids the traps of formalism, it is because part of his work process, albeit fundamentally influenced by the non-objective avant-garde starting with De Stjil then Bauhaus, is anchored in real life. The artist stresses that his work is intuitive and that there is no mathematics involved; also that he uses images registered during city walks. The strong visual impact of ’a huge pink shape consisting of isolation panels mounted on the outside brick wall of a building under construction’ 1 was a motive force in the execution of this relaxed abstraction, which unashamedly runs through a whole range of pastel colours, including some sublime pinks…
This freestyle surfing of the non-objective also enables Tilman to introduce the experience of space into his painting by using structures that oscillate between sculpture and architecture, as in The House of Colors. Stemming from a reflection on floor objects, this unidentified modular object may be three-dimensional and have the feel of a hypothetical utopian construction but it is none the less a work of painting. Its size rules it out as a maquette but nor does it have the physical dimensions or indeed the functional purpose of architecture. Composed of multicoloured rectangular sections interlocked like a giant set of lego the work acts as a sort of observatory with multiple peepholes. The public is invited to experiment and look through this multi-angle viewfinder, not unlike the optical devices invented by painters down through the centuries, from the camera lucida to the camera obscura.
Tilman’s work is primarily about exploring the effect of light on forms and colours — visually, physically and psychologically. We should not forget that, quite apart from the fact that the artist comes from Munich and was influenced by the subtle half-tones of baroque painting, he started out in photography. In one of his catalogues entitled Look Awry (Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, 12 May – 25 June 2006), Tilman urged the public to look at his constructions ’awry’. Playing on the word’s double meaning this could also be understood as an injunction to look at the work ’askew’. The ’defects’ or lopsidedness in Tilman’s painting, with its slight dissonance of forms and colours tinged with humour but ultimately extremely elegant, clearly confer a human dimension on the work, transforming what is an art to look at into a space of experience.
Catherine Macchi de Vilhena
1 Tilman, Interview Tilman and Chris Ashley, May – June 2006.
LOST AND FOUND - CONCRETE FINDINGS
Living in a complex visual world, the artist today is constantly driven by a deeply rooted mechanism registering his surroundings. Curiosity stemming from a natural interest in the world in general and his immediate environment in particular leads him to archive visual and sensual impacts and impressions, real and abstract. Indulgence in personal discoveries and in the examination of things around him, with the massive stream of information that this involves, requires vivid anticipation. This ebb and flow of visual findings and sensations comes to play within the perimeter of his chosen artistic language – in this case the language of the ‘reductive’.
The artist detects objects and constellations of objects in their relationship to location; they are completely visual at first and clearly accessible to everybody attracted by the presence of things which go beyond their personal realm. These findings are common property, but they are often not registered as such and mostly left behind and forgotten, or simply not recognized as existing. This ‘lost property’ becomes environmental property and is swallowed up in a sea of diverse concreteness.
The artist’s ‘thinking’ eye, in a process of perceiving, consciously or subconsciously, appropriates these ‘findings’, transforms the images created in his personal universe and integrates them, in their own or in a processed concrete form, into the boundless territory of the non-objective. The found object or its image becomes concrete in its pure physical presence and in its pursuit of attention, and takes on a renewed relevance. Stripped of its original function it evokes new possibilities of existence without denying its actual authenticity.
And the information the perceiving mind receives and reads from those discoveries functions as a secret mechanism for luring the viewer into the process of perception and forms an overture for a bigger event.
The superimposition of the language of form and color inherent in the occupation with ‘strategies’ of the ‘reductive’, combined with the fact that they are related to a real visual world, leads to a complex construct of opportunities to read the resulting work of art, triggering the viewer’s senses and creating an opening for the properties of the formal artistic language intrinsic to ’reductive’ art.
These ‘findings’, discovered and observed in the context of everyday life, functioning or discarded, disconnected from the context in which they were produced and used, not only become mediators for higher claims within the artistic language but also highlight the essence of the ‘finding’ itself and the visual poetry inherent in it. The very act of seeing and perceiving is a constructive approach to reading one’s world intellectually and physically, digesting the givens of subjective and objective matter at the same time and place, and evoking the linearity of seemingly opposite languages. We are entering a world of possibilities, angles, openings, spaces, sensualities and intimacies; traces of thought in memory and presence come to the surface, decoding the concreteness of things.
By sharing our presence with the presence of those ‘findings’, seductive, physical and visual, we are constantly invited to look, to participate, to search, to discover and to satisfy our curiosity for the world. Integrated in the artistic language of the non-objective and embedded in its discourse this ‘offering’ could give us the opportunity to initiate a dialogue beyond the intrinsically concrete, extending out the tight margin of reading an artwork to a more personalized universe of thought with all its edges, detours, obstacles, traces and marks, to perception and reflection, and to the creation of associations which go beyond the concreteness of things per se and the formal language of non-objective, reductive or concrete art.
Tilman in: Tilman – Perdu / Trouvé, exhibition catalog, Galerie Eric Linard, Garde de Adhemar (FR), 2009, ISBN French & English
TILMAN
free colour
In history, it has been the activity of painting that has brought the colour of the surrounding world – be it natural or urban – into an image format, into a frame, or into an interior. In the form of a painted image, the viewer could not only witness a dramatic likeness of the world, but could also gain a feeling for the connection that the artist had with the subject matter of that image – through the colours used, the artist was able to practice a form of language that went above written or spoken words. Colour operates on a level that is as abstract as empathy itself.
Just as there are countless applications for colour as a tool towards pictorial description, it also has an unspeakably diverse history as a means for the communication of social and cultural values. Colour itself stands as an icon of status. It has the ability to exist as a rich, diverse, political, emotional, intellectual and psychological symbol. All of which are abstract values when represented in the form of a colour.
Piet Mondrian used the term Plasticism to express the pure reality of colour. It occurred to Mondrian that >>the new reality was the reality of plastic expression, or the reality of forms and colours in painting<<. Following this realisation, he then in collaboration with Theo Van Doesburg went on to galvanise this theory of colour painting by developing Neo-Plasticism in 1920, which is the term generally applicable to the majority of work produced by the artists associated with the De Stijl movement.
These two artists focused upon colour in the purist sense. Following their radical distillation of the picture plane into geometric elements, they certainly revolutionised a number of understandings of colour, and they developed its presentation and application as a very important value of its own.
One particular level of appreciation for colour is in the form of the painted object. Through the application of paint to a sculptural material, that object could then embody colour as an entity with specific dimensions. In concept, that object would then become a concentrated mass of colour with internal volume. The colour could then become an integer, or a building block for artworks such as painting constructions, assemblages, wall reliefs and spatial models such as mobiles, stabiles, and much more recently, site-specific installations, where the volume of the work could become dispersed, decentred or intuitively located according to the ambient characteristics of differing sites.
Moving into the present tense, it often seems futile to draw lines between differing forms of the ‘Abstract’, ‘Concrete’, or ‘Plastic’ in contemporary art. Most of the time, it may be better to leave definitions like these behind, utterly dissolved as they have become.
To follow this idea of Neo-Plasticism and the painted object, there seems to be a vast array of contemporary Abstract Art practitioners developing an expanded variation of the De Stijl program. That is, not only do they appear to offer a purist view of colour, but they are also able to build a very abstract level of commentary into their work, so that they may focus upon some of the intricacies concerning themselves and their own ‘world view’.
One such artist might be the German-born, Brussels resident Tilman, whose use of colour and tone along with intuitive placement produces visually complex constructions of both fixed and site-specific nature.
Within Tilman’s work, careful juxtaposition of tonally moderated forms of colour derive their significance from outside themselves – their complex structure seems somehow closely related to the world that they are made from. Even given their clean nature, these informal and approachable arrangements of painted objects seem to reference imperfect qualities just as much as they exude notes of unity, complement and harmony.
The use of bright colour in 10.07 (stack) assists in a Concrete reading. 10.07 (stack) is a work consisting of painted objects. Each object has been treated individually with the knowledge that each element will in fact somehow become a composite part within a work. The order of the elements is unknown before the time of making. The final appearance of the work is unknown until finished. In fact, the orientation of the work may be completely under question until the finished arrangement of painted objects can be seen entirely. It therefore becomes a cluster of visual activity, including both seen and unseen areas of layered contact. As a chromatic body of sorts, a collection with object status and dimensional form.
Tilman’s works are experiments in colour. They test new boundaries in terms of placement and juxtaposition of colour and form. Perhaps the artist sees the inner spaces of his Stacks as being ideal spaces for new colour experiments. Could this be why we see a high degree of considered experimentation and careful intuition when it comes to examining the placement and juxtaposition of those elements within each of his works? Negative spaces offset intuitively slotted elements just as colour combinations jar as deliberately (and interestingly) as those that sit comfortably.
Here, by working through chromatic values such as pitch, saturation, tone, hue and contrast, Tilman presents the most abstract qualities of colour; those aspects of a colour that go beyond reference to anything and have no associative value.
This is the point from which these colours can begin to function in a ‘controlled environment’. In reaching this level of hermetic purity, works such as 10.07 (stack) and 24.06 (Val Duchesse) embody the specific colour interactions within themselves.
They are no longer a work about some kind of intangible association with the world.
These works are only (but not simply) about themselves.
To look a work such as 24.06 (Val Duchesse) requires the viewer to completely ignore vague interpretive assumptions concerning likeness or landscape. To actually see this work is to utterly ignore the whole idea of colour representing anything directly. Indeed, the very key into looking at the visual activity of 24.06 (Val Duchesse) is to forget the whole notion of colour as colour, and to begin by seeing the work as a mental manipulation, as a construction made from synthetic materials and values; the content of which are strictly specific to the work.
Within the visual activity of 24.06 (Val Duchesse), one cannot help but notice simultaneous occurrences, multi-layered interractions, gradual shifts of visual weight and changing points of balance. To see this multifarious phenomenae as a concept of an experience, and to consider these material events as being only unto themsleves…surely this is what it means to view the work as some kind of Plastic moment, where the work is centred in a purist perceptual space that becomes the context for the crystallization of inexplicable momentary realisations – concerning only the work and the viewer.
Perhaps the key imperative to the use of colour in Tilman’s work is that it is employed in the atmospheric sense. That way, colour becomes a device for experience and the purchase-point for the viewer to appreciate the form(s) of the work also, as both eventually become indivisible.
The artificiality of the materials used to construct each work seem to negate a connection to the earth or surrounds of any sort. Even the public activity within the museum that surrounds his work – rich with occurrences and interractions – seems to be organic in comparison. Maybe it is the viewer who forms the link from the work back to the world, through that viewer’s careful process of looking slowly then leaving…
As I have called them, the material and colour ‘values’ present within each work seem to operate in ways separate to the natural laws of gravity and optics. The effects of which are deferred and present at the same time also. Tilman’s works mirror processes concerned with physical activity. Importance lies in decisions relating to placement. Yet there also hangs over each work the idea of the process as an extended continuum, and an artist’s language being a string of works larger than any finished form.
The whole idea of the title for this essay, free colour, is one of wonderment – of what the result would be if colour were allowed to escape logical readings. To instead be allowed to exercise empathic effect in a way that may be as yet unconsidered. To successfully do this would perhaps allow Tilman’s use of colour ‘value’ the space to become an idea of colour, a slight revision of the process and interpretation of colour when coupled with form. This would however require the co-operation of a viewer, willing to look unfalteringly.
Maybe the biggest challenge here lies with the viewer.
Justin Andrews
Melbourne, May 2008
SPOTLIGHT ON
interview
introduction
Tilman has stated that his art has completely moved into the three-dimensional realm, and that his use of and response to architecture requires finding a balance between various environments and the objects that he makes and situates in these environments. Inspired by everyday objects and structures, his goal is to present and represent light using color and form, which is mediated through the objects he makes, the structures in which the objects are located, and the overall integrated installation. As René Kockelkorn writes about Tilman’s exhibition F218B-BXL, at CCNOA, Brussels in 2004, “in short, this is not merely an art to look at, but a physical and psychical space of experience.”
In the following interview the reader will find the word location used several times, and there are two instances where this word is extended to locational and locationality. In reference to a pink shape he saw on the side of a building in New York which later influenced an art work of his, Tilman says, “somehow it caught my eye and I was fascinated by its awkward shape and color, and also its locational relationship.” It wasn’t merely the pink shape that mattered, but also the place where it was situated and what surrounded it. And in our discussion about site-specific and installation art, he says, “a work which is truly site-specific for me is a work which is locationally immanent, if one can say this, rather than a work which can be transported to any other location.”
In particular, I am very fond of his use of the word “immanent” here, meaning indwelling; inherent; or all pervading, which perhaps even carries a sense of transcendence. “Locationally immanent” would mean that something is where it is meant to be, and that it can’t be anywhere else. Much of what Tilman attempts in his recent work is the use objects and color to create situations that feel natural and original, yet are structured and heightened places in which the viewer experiences form and light; one might call these immanent locations.
Chris Ashley, June 2006
The following conversation between Tilman l and Chris Ashley was conducted via email in English between April and May 2006. For further information about Chris Ashley, please visit www.chrisashley.net. Or www.minusspace.com
Chris Ashley: Your work F218B-BXL installed at CCNOA, Brussels in 2003 incorporated video and sound by Johan Vandermaelen. What was your thinking about including environmental sound in your installation? Is this the first time that you’ve included other media in an installation of yours, and is it something you intend to do again?
Tilman: F 218 B-BXL was the first site-specific installation; its basic aim was to create a dialogue between certain elements in my work, but also of perception itself. I found it interesting to include also various media into my process to add another layer of possible perceptive momentum. Sound, for example, became by bits an architectural structure and yet another element in these rooms on the same level as maybe a flat wall work. It definitely is not meant as an atmospheric addition.
CA: During 2006 you have three solo exhibitions scheduled in Oslo, Dusseldorf, and Sydney. Can you tell me about the work you will be showing in these different locations, how the work is different or the same, and if these different cities affect either the work you are showing or the installation?
T: Oslo is a rather involved project. The show will contain seven stacked and layered wall objects, two floor objects and one large floor/wall object. All works are made for the space, some beforehand in my Brussels studio, and the large objects here in Oslo, on-site. The other gallery space will be occupied by a large installation similar to F 218 B-BXL. This installation will also contain different media, like video and a sound piece by Belgian composer Aernoudt Jacobs, who composed this piece especially for this space and installation.
A rather small gallery, Konsortium, will host the show in Düsseldorf and in this venue I will show drawings and one wall object deriving from those drawings. The series of drawings is called Fundstueck/gridworks, and is based on an object my eyes caught in New York two years ago—a mimetic relation, maybe.
The SNO (Sydney Non Objective) show later this year will most probably be a site-specific installation, due to the location and also due to the practicality—Sydney is a bit far away. But no specific plans are made yet for this show.
In general I could say that a special location does not influence my work in particular, except that by traveling far distances to have exhibitions I got into working site-specifically and also more experimental lydue to this situation, a flexibility which I had to get acquainted with first, but now I feel very confident with this process of art-making; the post-studio thing, to maybe call it, helped me in some ways in the creative act and broadened my ways of approaching and dealing with the process of making a work of art.
CA: What was it that caught your eye in New York on which you based these drawings? Do you often get ideas like this from your environment? Is much of your work based on other objects or something in the environment?
T: That specific image I detected in New York was actually a huge pink shape consisting of isolation panels mounted on the outside brick wall of a building under construction, and somehow it caught my eye and I was fascinated by its awkward shape and color, and also its locational relationship. But it is not that I am specifically looking for images like this—they just occur, and if they are strong enough, they find their way slowly into the process. So I am trying to say that especially the architectural objects are not entirely dependent on this process of seeing. This also can happen by working on drawings and making sort of loose sketches, especially when it comes to larger artworks. But yes, I cannot deny a relationship to daily life objects, or at least the impulse I get from looking at things, objects, and my environment.
CA: Let’s talk about this idea of the “post-studio” practice, a not uncommon practice for many artists now. I see a breakdown of art that is made in the studio, or made outside the studio, or is half-and-half. There are artists who don’t have a studio beyond, say, a laptop, and who work with teams or fabricators. Can you say more about this, and how it broadens your practice? You’re still working in a studio, too, so are these approaches ever really separate, or is it more porous, something shifting back and forth?
T: “The world becomes the studio”—this is a line used by a New Zealand-based art critic, and I can definitely relate to this quote. So in my case, this became an issue after being invited to places like Australia, or in cases of working with art-spaces that run on a low budget. The works I execute then are usually made site-specific, or I find a place where I can continue the regular studio practice, so in this case I can set up a temporary studio wherever I want. Maybe the idea of working in one place—the studio—is a very romantic idea in these times and days, and then may be one day it becomes important again. The intimacy of the studio is still important, so to say, but also the flexibility of location, time and space are a big part of my working process, without interfering with the essential idea of my work.
CA: The literature about your work and your own statements emphasize your interest in color and light. Your realization that light and color were your main concerns came over time, and through painting, and in some ways you are still involved in painting, but also sculpture. I’m curious to know about why and how you make solid colored objects in order to get at the effects of light. What result are you after in setting up for the viewer a situation where light is made with objects?
T: I guess my early interests in light stem from my concern for photography, which developed very young, also always painting at the same time. Working with photography ended basically in doing very experimental photos about movement of light. Photography seemed not the right tool for me then, and I turned to painting to explore light and its essential visual quality. Sure, for a long time I literally painted and tried to paint/catch light, and through years of working and researching in different modes and styles (bad word, I know), I arrived very slowly at a much-reduced form to give light its platform. So in this term, I understand my works of art as more carriers for existing light, and they can be flat, three dimensional art arranged in an installation. A strong point in this mode of working is to invite the viewer to participate in this physical experience, to look and understand the subtleties of light and the objects and, in general, I think this can also spur more philosophical or even psychological points of understanding than the work of art might offer at first sight.
CA: What do you see as the philosophical and psychological aspects of experiencing and understanding your work? Perception of light and color are primary experiences in your work, and these take place through certain forms. These forms are hung or installed in specific ways, and may be integral to an architectural setting, perhaps bearing the influence of architecture. We are all familiar with and can deeply experience architectural spaces—we move through them, live in them, work in them. Our experience of space, and much of our lives, is shaped by architecture, and color and light. In “The Poetics of Space,” Gaston Bachelard applies the method of Phenomenology to examine our experience of architecture, looking closely at various kinds of shapes and spaces. Some of our experience is less conscious, even automatic, but at some point we become more aware of our interactions with various kinds of spaces. Our reactions are at first physical, gradually turning to awareness and meaning—which might be a psychological recognition—and then as we process this it becomes an idea or an ideal, entering the realm of philosophy. Our looking translates into an intellectual process and vice-versa, and it can be a very interesting process. How does your art act in the continuum from the physical, to the psychological, to the philosophical?
T: I find your reference to Bachelards book very interesting. Once I bought this book, about a half a year ago, but didn’t yet find time to focus on it. The short rundown on Bachelards thoughts and ideas definitely reflects some subjects I am dealing with in my work, although I am missing subjects like personal physicality, sensuality and above all the factors of time, but, well, I haven’t read it yet. Also, he is maybe more referring to the architectural space compared to the architectural/intimate space of a work of art. For me, those questions evolved over a period of time, and the observations I made regarding the viewer’s act of seeing. Once my works developed into three-dimensional objects I observed that most of the viewers still perceived those works as two-dimensional works, which deeply irritated me and raised a lot of questions about perception. I then introduced those rather small boxes, called Volumina, and besides their own autonomy as works of art they also helped to seduce the viewer into another act of seeing and perception. The viewer all of a sudden understood the three-dimensionality of the other works—looking behind, creating a curiosity—and once being three-dimensional those works created also a physicality within the viewer, which led to questions of psychology and, last but not least, philosophy. There is sure more to say towards that subject, but maybe you get an idea of what I am aiming for.
CA: There are other artists with a strong psychological and philosophical foundation, who also deal with light and color. How do you see your work in terms of the history of other artists for whom pure color and light are central, for example Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin, or James Turrell?
T: Well, I think history is long and there are many artists I am interested in from Renaissance to today, and I think this is a quite complex question. The three names you mention are sort of tied into Minimalism, and sure I respect their work in their own form of dealing with the phenomena of light, but I do not understand myself as a Minimalist. There are certainly thoughts which I am very interested in, and also a certain aesthetic, but I wouldn’t nail down my approach to them. A very strong influence was a rather unknown artist who died recently, Robert Fosdick, and maybe also Belgian artist Marthe Wéry, who also died last year. I can definitely say that there is a tradition in my language of art starting more precisely maybe with De Stijl and Bauhaus, for example.
CA: Can you say a little more about Fosdick and Wéry, their work, and their influence?
T: As for my friend Robert Fosdick, I have to say that it wasn’t necessarily the actuality of his individual works, it was the ideas he gave me about, let’s say, possibilities for understanding the subtleties of light. Deeply embedded in the dialogue between the realistic, scientific understanding of the natural phenomena of light itself, and on the other side a philosophical, spiritual approach towards it, the conversations with him supported my own development and triggered a manifold of questions in me.
As for Marthe Wéry, I guess we met just like that, a deep understanding in what we were both after in terms of physicality and intellect, the relationship between an art object and its function in architectural space, the importance of light as a mending plate between those entities, an almost sensoround experience, the questions of one’s own physicality, one’s own physical position—where do we stand?
CA: Going back to Minimalism, in his well-known essay “Art and Objecthood,” first published in “Artforum” in June 1967, Michael Fried used the word “theatricality” to describe, and criticize, Minimalism’s phenomenon of an object or form in real space experienced in real time. This attribute eventually came to have many positive connotations. When I mentioned Irwin, Flavin, and Turrell, I wasn’t really thinking of your work as Minimalism; I asked about them because light and perception are central to your work. But now, given your use of installation, I’m wondering whether or not you incorporate this “theatrical” aspect of installation into your work.
T: I think the term “theatrical” in this respect is theatrical in itself, and also maybe the term “installation” is wrong to describe those spaces I create. They are clearly site-specific in their nature, which I think installation art is not. The spaces I create are clearly connected to its location. They never can be set up again in the same manner once they are standing in an important dialogue with its architectural environment and the existing light conditions. I do not understand the architectural environment as a setting or stage in that sense.
CA: How is it possible that an installation is not site-specific? I wonder if what you mean is that installation art doesn’t have to be site-specific. It is dependent on the location, which can change each time the work is installed, in different conditions. Regarding your work, do you mean that the architectural environment in which you install your work is not a backdrop or a platform, but is integrated into something larger— the entire work would include your objects or interventions, plus the environment?
T: Sure, all installations are in some way site-specific; I just wanted to draw a line there between installation and site-specific, which you actually answered with the second part of your question regarding this subject. A work, which is truly site-specific for me is a work which is locationally immanent, if one can say this, rather than a work which can be transported to any other location and re-installed in a maybe slightly different configuration within any given space.
CA: Much of your work certainly shares the essential characteristics of de Stijl: pure abstraction; a reduction to essential form and color; an emphasis on vertical and horizontal, and individual, discrete works. The Bauhaus’ key characteristics are architecture and function, and the philosophy that the practice of art is situated in a greater totality. How do you see your work in relation to this?
T: I guess there is definitely a relation to those thoughts. Josef Albers’ quote that “art shall open eyes” is also very important in the bigger picture to make art accessible. And I truly believe that the idea of reduction and the search for the subtleties in reductive art can open doors for understanding the bigger picture in a visual, physical, intellectual way. This art is not aiming to be self-contained; it wants to relate, to give, to breathe.
CA: Do you arrive at the format and sizes of your work intuitively, or are proportion and numbers important drivers for your work?
T: My process of working is usually a very loose one, very intuitive. I seldom work on proper sketches although, sure, when it comes to large-scale works I have to sort of plan them out.
But there’s no math or any relation to math involved. I could say more that there is a definite relationship to architecture and building and creating spaces. The objects actually could be described as micro-architectures, and I also believe there’s a sort of architecture, or maybe better structure, in the chaotic, incidental appearance of things which constantly find their way into our eyes.
CA: The idea of micro- and incidental architecture is interesting. For example, a work like 4103, which is a small box open on the top and bottom hung high on a wall near the ceiling could be initially taken for a sign, or a fire alarm, or some kind of sensor or detector. What look like large colored sheets of fiberboard in E472C-BSL lean against the wall or are propped up off the floor on small planks, like sections of wall waiting to be installed. The stacked pieces in F218B-BXL are placed like construction materials that have just been delivered to a site, ready to be used. Elements : Squares are like colorful aluminum window frames on display at a home design convention. Besides the forms you use, I think I see in your use of color a connection to very contemporary, popular architecture.
T: I think there is definitely a connection in my works to architectural space in general, as a physical space in relation to one’s own physicality and its relation to it: what do we see, where are we standing, what is going on? There are those kinds of thing around us, those relationships, to discover and see. Things that look awry are the concerns of this work. As for the use of color, I don’t really know whether there is a direct connection to architecture. In architecture, yes, color gets used in many different aspects—as form, as decoration, etc. In my work color functions under a very different umbrella—it is light.
CA: The color is material, first. It could be the natural color of the material, or painted, or printed, or the color is applied in some way. It’s a property of the object. Of course, color is made possible by light, but how does the color move from being a physical thing to being simply light?
T: In early Greek philosophy, light is described as the fourth element, the ether; they called it Olkas, a carrier which holds all together. That’s what I am trying to say with simply light, making a reference to this thought. So color, yes, as a material it becomes a carrier of thought, something essential, so to say.
CA: After all of these exhibitions, what next?
T: Well, first of all I need a break, but in general I might say that I haven’t played out all the possibilities which my work process offers. After all, it is slow art, and I cannot just produce, period. So I guess I will keep on researching my own possibilitie.
By the middle of the twentieth century, abstraction seemed the incontestable future of painting. That has since proved ironic, as contemporary assessments of nonobjective art often sound like obituary notices. This putative demise implies abstract painters are now merely parodying an atrophied genre. Yet Tilman’s work entices us to move closer and look awry, to crouch along floor-stacked edges and follow the glint of corners suffused with color. No critical dismissal can subdue the evocative potential of this intimacy, towards which he has been drawing us for nearly a decade.
The simplicity of his work belies this daring ploy; there seems little to see, but yet so much to say about it. Abstract painters of the last few decades have felt an almost neurotic need to justify their practice, if not redeem the entire project of modernist abstraction. Tilman’s work suggests that the act of looking can itself be regenerative, regardless of the vagaries of taste. If the vitality of abstract painting is in latency---derailed by morbid euphemisms---perhaps all that is needed is to follow the ludic enticement and look anew. Tilman certainly invites us to do this assiduously. In doing so, he also makes us reassess the reductive tendencies in post-War painting, precisely through its unique phenomenological concerns. With an unequivocal assertion of authenticity, his work suggests that only abstract painting can bring us there.
Tilman’s own route to the current series of paintings—modular objects constructed from MDF board and plexi-glass---mirrors that of their ideational and expressive aims. Both are the result of a creative endurance, an ability to reconcile concerns that supposedly exist in tacit discord: hard-edge abstraction and sculptural work, Minimalism and photography, installation art and the autonomous artwork. Tilman has thrived on abutting precisely those issues that seem diametrically opposed, as painting itself has continuously assimilated materials and techniques, which at first seem like incursions. A productive reconciliation, Tilman’s additive approach unites all such concerns under a single premise: that a painting is a carrier of light, mediating our experience of it as a physical quality.
This singular focus is drawn from early experiments with photography in the late 1970s. Tilman originally explored the constituent elements of his current practice—light and color—through purely photographic means. But however analytical or self-reflexive in its use, photography implies working with an image made from light rather than setting an encounter with it. Photography’s formalist areas of competence thus seldom stray from expressive abstraction, as in the mechanical manipulation of the camera (a kind of literal referentiality). These limits of the abstract in photography served as an impetus to pare down to less technological means; a realization that a medium that is itself constituted by light may not be the best in which to work with it.
There is a significant historical parallel: the language of abstraction was itself spurred by the invention of photography, to which pictorial representation was in a sense bequeathed as a result. Yet photography’s supposed dominance of pictorialism in the early 20th century---the first ‘death of painting’----actually turned painting into a self-defining medium. Painters were free to pursue a radical shift from delineating the subject matter of a painting to working with its compositional object matter.
Negotiating the confines of this tradition, and turning away from photography, Tilman adopted light, and by implication color, as the basis of his formal language. It entailed not only returning to the root of non-representational art but also to one of the most fundamental aspects of all painting, from Masacio to Marden---yet a return freed of any meretricious or formulaic reenactment. The result is the basic phenotype of his current work: more painted object than discrete painting, each is constructed from angled, juxtaposed, stacked, or staggered panels of MDF, wood and plexi-glass. Covered on all sides with a monochromatic layer of oil lacquer, these built forms are laboriously handcrafted despite their fabricated appearance; Tilman makes no attempt to cover his tracks by beautifying them. Subjected to degrees of morphological change, the basic arrangement yields paintings set in relief or precariously stacked, called Reflectors; paintings leaned or arranged as floor pieces, which Tilman dubs ‘Transforms’; and the almost serial rectangular boxes in the ‘Volumes’ series.
In each set of forms, color is treated as an object with mass and extension. Light, in essence, paints the physical world; the colors of a painter’s palate are merely absorptive light governed by rules of subtraction. As this bare facticity governs Tilman’s work, common denominators of abstraction such as flatness, plasticity, and materiality become subservient to the interplay between translucence (plexi-glass) and opaqueness (wood). Yet Tilman also brings a formal and compositional intelligence to bear on the paintings, concerned as he is with the subjective timbre, value, and subtle placement of color.
His attention to the latter implicates the viewer in a process of discovery. Emphatic monochromatic surfaces are merely decoys: Tilman’s works are all-over paintings, protruding borders and activated edges radiating with color. "The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall," wrote Donald Judd." A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside it.” Working outside the confines of the traditional picture-support, Tilman takes Judd’s polemic to its logical endgame, dispensing with the picture plane as a mediating element. Shifting the usual axis of attention, the works three-dimensional sculptural volumes direct the eye away from the strict planar arrangement of monochromatic surfaces, undermining basic physical and aesthetic assumptions of looking at a painting.
This phenomenological confrontation—part of Tilman’s assimilation of Minimalist sculptural practice---is part of his work’s openness to contingency and context. Tilman’s attention to both becomes a primary concern in his site-specific, architectural arrangement of paintings, challenging conceptions of the autonomous artwork—the fetish object of modernism---with the ethos of installation art. Tilman’s serial works, for example, are serial appearance but not in effect, as the rhythmic qualities color and changing light give a unique quality to each of the repetitive forms. The paintings are thus objects in a state of perpetual change, subject to transformation by qualitative and quantitative variations of their spatial character, of their inhabited space.
In this sense, Tilman’s paintings ask to be looked at the way one actually approaches the shifting perception of the physical world. The viewer of invited to peer below, underneath, aside, and sometimes literally inside a painting. Tilman attracts that simple yet rewarding curiosity: the playful impulse to look inside a box or around a corner. An exploratory dimension is thus added to the act of looking, a physicality supplementing the unfolding of apperception traditionally associated with abstraction. To perceive becomes to participate. As Merleau Ponty suggested, “the perceiving mind is an incarnate mind.” Tilman’s work seems to cleverly ask apropos of abstract painting: “Where do you stand? What is your position?”
João Ribas
January, 2006,
New York CityJoão Ribas is a writer, art critic, editor and curator whose writing appears in several international arts and culture publications.
Sydney Australia lies far south of the tropic of Capricorn, and traveling to the antipodes (meaning upside down world) can be quite an experience for visiting artists, with most usually having little if any avenue into the somewhat mysterious ways of the local art scene. Typically, it is the central towns where most art is made and sold for instance, and these places of communion are fairly recent western European settlements that exist at odds within the wider Asia-Pacific setting. As a consequence, the Antipodes contain an extraordinary mix of cultures, and being generally quite expensive places to live in they invariably provide any and every form of luxury and amenity - yet just as typically they can be bitterly unkind for others without.
Importantly, the capitals are built on top of the ancestral homes of a variety of aborigine tribes belonging to the Koori nation. In fact, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, and Brisbane, might be described as interventions forming a kind of artificial or post colonial cultural encirclement of what remains an ancient continent, just as they play host to as many familiar western conventions immediately recognizable to a visitor upon such distant shores. In this sense, the vast land mass of the great Southern continent, with its Spartan array of electrified cities subsisting mysteriously in parallel with much older ways, face forces both natural and psychological staying as tangible to the senses as they did for those who made first settlement in the late 1700s. Increasingly, they are places of art-critical effort where local, national, and international artists curators, critics, must attempt to contemporaneously redefine the unique blend of cultural, geographical, and architectural concerns governing regional national identity. But mostly, the highly cherished yet utterly negotiable convention of the isolate mystagogism of, the Antipodean.
It was while traveling in the Netherlands, far from my home on a small river named after the English Captain Cook feeding Botany Bay, that I met the German born artist Tilman from Brussels. This was at an informal meeting in an Amsterdam bar where Kyle Jenkins, Jan Van der Ploeg, and Olivier Mosset, were also present. It was suggested at that time that Tilman who operates CCNOA with Petra Bungert in Brussels, that he should make a journey to Australia to show his work - as some of the other European based artists had done recently. Importantly, Tilman and the Australian Jenkins first met in Los Angeles in 2003. Later working together on the ‘Minimal Pop’ group show that toured to New York, then Paris and Brussels in 2005. A short while after this brief meeting Tilman was formally invited to show in Australia as a guest of a local artists association known as, S.N.O. (Sydney Non Objective Group).
The first installation featured a collaboration between Tilman and his Object/Light Work’s and Jenkins Wall Work Project. This was held in the S.N.O. Showroom, a small factory space near Sydney’s airport on 1st September 2005. A second presentation was held at NOT Gallery in Southern Queensland, on the 8th September. That ‘group show’ entailed only three small monochromatic works by Tilman, Jenkins, and myself. A third and final show was a solo of Tilman’s wall and floor pieces, and held at MOP Projects on the 14th. This in conjunction with a group of artists from QLD that Tilman had met and who showed in an auxiliary space in Sydney of MOP Projects. This is another artist run space in Sydney’s inner city precinct that had originally been established by Kyle Jenkins, the New Zealand writer, Ben Curnow, and myself. Interestingly, all these interrelated works, made by a variety of artists, were produced for the three specific events upon Tilman’s arrival. Then installed at the various venues. No small feat considering the very limited amount time made available.
As mentioned, the writer Ben Curnow earlier defined an aspect of the ‘post formalist’ genre when he discussed how a whole body of new work such as Tilman produced had been readily achieved. That is, within his first and especial foray into the embroiled art-cultural politic of Australian art historicism. Importantly, it is really necessary to understand that Australia is an art-critical location where ‘new figuration’ remains the dominant discourse of its’ cognoscenti. Curnow, in referring directly to the kinds of formal artists S.N.O. prefers to work with instead, noted, “ …it is straightforwardly because of a real necessity that the world has become a studio for these artists”. As an artist first, and as a reluctant organisor or curator of artists similarly engaging in highly formalised processes second, I could not agree more with Curnow’s assessment of how fluid the genre of non objective art making has become in recent decades. Further, this aspect speaks of a heightened level of interaction within related practices in the Australasian context, but also it refers to a trans-cultural process of reexamination of mostly concrete, constructive, and radical painting concerns stemming from out of an ever-widening array of international locations.
In speaking for myself, Tilman’s art is absorbing for many reasons but it is significant to note that he is an example of a growing number of visiting art makers who, above all else, are deeply engaged in the specifics of a practice. Just as his approach is emblematic of a certain necessity today, he is an international art maker who produces work anywhere without loss of connection to place, tastes or, traditions, et al. The work Tilman produced in Australia for example (see fig no.1), exudes a casualness that belies a capability and craftsmanship that is highly responsive to the specifics of a situation, whilst it is also true that his expression remains demonstrative of a rigor that itself stems from an informing developmental methodology. This may be defined as a responsive process - to as many traditions, issues, or, concerns of interest to the artist. Overall, an inclusive course of action appears in place of banal revision of abstraction and the like within a critical methodology that is nonetheless seeking out an engagement with popular culture. That is, as much as it is representative on a conceptual level of specific artistic response. One that confirms his considered deliberation of personal expression within that system.
This last commentary is an affirmation of what is meant when terminology such as ‘developmental’ is used here to define formal or, reductive artists. This leads into the very substance of what I believe the art Tilman made in Sydney is about. It may also provide a way of finding an accessible entry point into his contemporaneous ideas and how these may in fact be functioning in the philosophical present. They are not obviously reliant on conspicuous portrayals of ironic orderings of language. Where Tilman is concerned, colour is considered almost unitarily as ‘light’, a conceptualism made comprehensible by the artist as a uniquely workable substance. Tilman’s art operates as a ‘precept’ that encapsulates or paraphrases such ideas once made apparent in some form. Simultaneously, the structures of intellection that his work summons or, the ‘experiential luminosity’ one perceives through the artifact, is in a sense a notional concern released into the viewer’s own experiential domain. Simply put, the now unstable notion of form and its perception, in Tilman’s discreet analysis, is a readable type of developmental motif. Curiously, what is expanded and deliberated upon through various media is the literal immateriality of light itself. Tilman’s sardonic humor concerning his supposed ‘catching of light’ may be best described in phenomenological terms, as, felt experience. In brief, a fresh discourse on what painting within the domain of non-literal minimalism may have more recently come to imply, has been offered by Tilman and his sponsors, the Ministry of the Vlaamse Gemeenschaap (Belgium), during his Australian journey.
There is definitely an aesthetic in play here somewhat regardless of prior internationalist connotations. However, what Tilman’s work implies within a ‘regionalised’ therefore, deeply art-historicised environment is that any artist may present us with a system of generic or familial manipulations of perception. This is done for us to enjoy somehow. In Tilmans case, a presentation has been given by a visiting art-maker on a subject matter whose longstanding criticisms have rather clumsily hung over from the modernist paradigm - then spread into the post-modern era and beyond, as kind of local art-critical furphy. Regionally for instance, long before any contemporary ‘reductive work’ is to be critically considered, its very ‘painterliness’ may summon the notion of ‘Painting’ as it had entered its a politicised status of ‘deadness’, as it was first argued decades ago. Moreover, there is a tendency towards recensive theoretical process that arises in places like Australia and New Zealand that exposes a never reconciled fervor - for nationalist impulses. That is, for a deep seated prejudice is a marvel in the contemporary visual arts arena that continues to seeking an evisceration of developments within a greater formalist enterprise – made more obvious whenever topics such as ‘New Figuration’, convergent expression, and the like are offered as the tried and trusted, worse, acceptable antidote to art that refuses to bear any direct association to social realism. What is eschewed in Tilman’s work literally exists within such a renegotiation of what Americans had once claimed was Minimalism for instance, but it is most significantly a point of order for an artist who I understand owes a much more interesting debt to preceding Constructivist, Suprematist and later Concrete art movements for example. If the convention of convergent expression is only a conglomeration of styles today, why is that a language that went beyond the binary of realism/abstraction first emerging in the 1930’s in the work of artists Theo Van Doesburg or Sonya Delauney, and continuously reappeared in 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and beyond in countless ways is often considered pointless - inclusively, a language that provides a knowledge of as many responses to conventions and forms of conservatism therein. The art critical voracity of this last point remains as challenging for the European, the Australian, or anyone from anywhere else at all, whenever an overarching criticality becomes misplaced as surety, knowingness, or worst, is enshrined as art historical fact.
This is a simplified assessment of place and standards. Likewise, what a considered reductive artists such as Tilman offers regional discourse is it self, not undemanding. Resident within Tilman’s reductive motif is an expose of a contemporary concern for materials and processes. His work provides an insight into a specific tradition or knowledge stream that has long existed within popular culture, worldwide. A now more common process of thought that has generally sought an understanding of what is actually possible beyond the conventions of both realism and abstraction. In my opinion, this understanding is considered something more interesting than a reading of a banal formal experience of the supposed minimalists latest objectwork, as some will continue to have newer ‘formalist’ styles outlined. Herein, the topic defers further to the supposed contemporary currency of ironic predisposition within revisionist painting discourses for instance. As mentioned above, a combinational style far more prevalent today within the triumph of regional art-historicism that remains ever subservient to its own semantic tales. Tilmans art, in its turn, offers some antidote to mystagogic convention, cynicism, and a bold resistance to the defrayment of conservativie impulses in the over institutionlised ‘outcome oriented’ market place of contemporary art.
The S.N.O. Group committee thanks Tilman for showing with their associated artists, and gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided by the Ministry of the Vlaamse Gemeenschaap (Belgium).
Dr Billy Gruner, Director S.N.O. Group, Sydney 2005
Nous sommes habitués, presque conditionnés à une certaine distinction ou corrélation entre le réel et imaginaire. Toute notre pensée entretient un jeu dialectique entre ces deux notions.
(We are used to and even conditioned by a certain distinction or correlation between the real and the imaginary. Our thought engages in a dialectical play between these two notions.)
Gilles Deleuze
Encounters with Tilman’s work, it has been pointed out, usually result in an awareness of light and color as the most important components of his artistic practice. While this might be true for his early works, it does not apply to his installation F218B-BXL. It appears to me, that in this case it is more about the reciprocal play between light and shadow: not in the sense of the presence and absence of light, but in the sense of compression and expansion. While light manifests itself in the collapse of the Euclidean space, shadow manifests itself through its construction.
Tilman’s work is set up in a spacious exhibition space with many windows and a high ceiling. The elements in this artistic intervention - a tilted wall, built over nearly the entire length of the existing wall, stacked ’building elements’ in the center of the room (a deconstructed multiple, whose dimensions repeat those of the wall), a monitor for a video presentation as well as two loudspeakers – is of an abundance that diminishes the space. A feeling of density emerges, which is intensified by a ubiquitous pastel green; its effect is one of obstruction.
The whole is embedded in an ambiance of sound and, depending on the time of the day, in an iridescent intensity of light. Johan Vandermaelen’s composition Music for a Green Room is based on outside sounds and silences recorded here during a sunny and a rainy afternoon. The sound frequencies are oriented towards the mass of Tilman’s wall structure; in addition, video images flicker in fast rhythm over the retina. Image and sound, however, occasionally stop abruptly. In these moments the monochrome coloration achieves a soothing effect, though the intervention as a whole resembles a sensual inferno albeit with moments of quietness, silence, and standstill. This reminds one strongly of Gilles Deleuze’s mode of thinking, in which beings, forms, structures and organizations are methods by which an essence, fluid and heterogeneous in nature, is temporarily contracted, trapped, tamed or slowed down to the point where its movement is barely discernable.
Tilman’s installation is essentially to be taken as a constructed reality, which should be translated, in my view, into the segmented unity of the imaginary. The visualization of space, the ordering principles of the numeric encoding appear to obstruct the world for the viewer, but actually Tilman creates new symbolic levels. Vermaelen’s composition works in a similar way. He creates an ’acoustic space’, not reducible to the conventional sense of music or sound, but as a sound space with a comprehensive sensuality, where simultaneity and immediacy are substituted for the succession of cause and effect. Seeing and hearing are given equal rights as sensory perceptions.
In short, this is not merely an art to look at, but a physical and psychical space of experience. It is a world with different rhythms and sounds, a constantly changing atmosphere, and cumulative effects to be experienced. Sound sequences, mathematical perspective construction, the rationalization of space, the number as a principle of order seizing reality - all this faces off against the complex, unregulated inner life of a human being. It is a telescoped conflation of several different levels of experience and consciousness.
René Kockelkorn, 2004
in: TILMAN - F218B-BXL - sound: Johan Vandermaelen
publication with DVD
text in Dutch/English/German/French – translation Guy de Bievre
ISBN 92-990006-1-1 Dépôt légal D/2004/914/1
published by CCNOA Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art Brussels 2004
My recent visit to the studio of Tilman in Brussels inspired the following thoughts. Since we all have different issues at stake in our work, those that engage us first in looking at another artist’s work are most likely the ones that come closest to our own. This enables a response that takes the form of a dialogue between works on either side of the mind’s eye.
At first glance it seems that Tilman has made a decisive break from his former gestural abstractions. This shift in style leads me to ponder over a classical rule: it’s either form or color. One is always privileged over the other; either form serves color or color form. I’ve yet to find the exception to the rule.
In the decade I have followed his work, Tilman’s choice has always been clear: form and structure are a vehicle for the interaction of colors. From this vantage point the gesture he makes to an apparent hard-edge style amounts to a new way of exploring the nature of color relationships, and in these new works, Transforms & Constellations, he’s got more edge.
Now each color has its own separate panel, and with the panels touching each other, the edge of the color is the edge of the panel. These long straight edges give the colors a lot of breathing room. In fact each of them is now autonomous. That’s how the structure of these works reads. But then wait a moment, that’s not altogether true, for colors also exist in a world all their own. It’s not a world where one thing follows another; everything happens at once. With a language and logic all its own, color is the mother tongue of a privileged few. In this Sensurround™ world we navigate with sensation and emotion submerging and emerging in the collected consciousness of our own sterling spoons. Our point of origin is our autonomy, subject and object are interlaced like a Mobius strip, and the projection is palpable.
As the poetry of these color relationships seeps in, so does the humor. All these soft effeminate colors, like you might find within the comfort of a little girl’s room, work to engage your preconceptions. Decorators’ colors: they beg you to dismiss them as one-dimensional, as frivolous, as merely pretty. All the while simple relationships of two and three colors work to create a space so solid and densely layered that before you know it you’ve been embraced. All the joy and celebration in Tilman’s works seem like a harmless bear hug until some precisely contrasting bright bit steps out and bites you, waking up the moment to the physical presence of color. It’s one of those jokes where you “have to be there”. It’s not on the page or the screen. It’s not in theory or a position. Being is everything in the sensible world these colors create. Dive in and flow: the beauty of your heartbeat is sensual. For the rest we return to the stability of the edge.
It is incumbent on every painter working today to address painting’s current raison d’être. In this new body of work Tilman has opted for expanding the frame. In a recent installation an array of MDF panels laid out in a grid takes on the floor. In another a single panel installed on the floor moves in on the room’s edge to meet a wall panel hanging directly above, giving the room one more corner to contemplate. In a strategy that seems to grow out of painting’s discomfort with the confines of its own frame, Tilman deploys the single panels to activate a larger field creating a space of jump starts and long rides.
His simple deviation from the tradition of eye-level sequencing in another installation allows a seemingly random placement of singular pieces to conquer the wall as its territory. The figure- ground relationship fluctuates here, creating multiple readings inside some of these individual pieces as it works to underscore the intent of a larger whole. In a Mandelbrot symphony this replication of scale shifts would be endless; here too there is no end to sight.
Tilman’s specific overtures towards the architectural elements of the exhibition room determine the room as a framing element for the modules whose inner relationships often mimic the overall installation strategy. One effect is to call to account painting’s original relationship to the wall as determinant of its very form. If the individual panels give up their autonomy as singular objects inside the exhibition space, the line between an autonomous work of art and “installation” becomes blurred. This play with determinacy foregrounds the question of painting’s autonomy by touching on the borders of one of the most vital of contemporary media. In installation art placement has replaced the primacy of the object.
Where the use of modules whose relationship to each other is determined through their installation is constituent, the presence of a sense of place comes to the fore. Recalling the plein air debates of the 19th century landscape painters that centered on working directly on site, in an ironic twist the full spectrum secreted in plein air’s vernacular triumph of the sensual resurfaces in contemporary abstraction indoors. Painters then as painters now know that only the very atmosphere we breathe communicates the real intent of the flesh.
In today’s world actual sightings paired with mediation through a secondary source reveal the core experience of viewing painting still to be an individual endeavor. If the charge of élitism dogs the plein air painters of today, it says more about the possibilities of an individual élan in the age of abject consumption than its peasant forebears could ever have hoped for.
If you’re still awake after this seduction, either you’ve got an unrelenting analytical mind or you’re checking up on a few tricks of the trade.
Joan Waltemath
in: Tilman - Transforms & Constellations
catalogue, 48 pages, 16 color reproductions
ISBN 92-990006-0-3 D 2000-9114-1
published by the artist & CCNOA, Brussels (B) 2000
“I have brought painting to its logical
conclusion and am putting three
paintings on display:
a red one, a blue one and a yellow one,
with the following assertion:
all has been done.
These are the primary colors.
Every surface is a surface and nothing
further is to be represented.
Each surface is spread to the edges with
one single color.
”
(Aleksandr Rodchenko)
Monochrome painting is usually referred back to Kasimir Malevich and his White Square on White. But if we were to look for an early outrider of Tilman’s new body of work, the three-canvas constellation Triptych of Smooth Paints by Aleksandr Rodchenko from 1921 would immediately come to mind. Rodchenko has given his own commentary on it, quoted above. It is true that Rodchenko in his assertion still dwells within essentialism connected to the primary colors. But in his ’triptych’ - if triptych it should be called - he has stepped out of the painting as a closed icon and deals with colored surfaces as physical objects put in relation to each other.
All has been done. In his Transforms, compositions constructed from individual physical parts, Tilman offers us a choice of panels. The surface of each panel is spread to the edges with one single color in smooth paint. He invites us to enter the world of colors and to put together our own composition from a chosen set of panels. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary, composition: a literary or musical work, an artistic arrangement of parts of a picture. I believe we should understand his offer as a metaphor or as an intellectual experiment for the sake of clarification rather than as a do-it-yourself proposition. When all has been done, this is how it works.
It all looks convincingly simple. But when it comes to art, there are always layers and always a road to the point where the artist offers us the presence and the simplicity of his work. When I try to trace the path covered in Tilman’s production, I come upon an amazing circumstance. Ten years ago, he was at the threshold of what he is doing today. He worked with a few simple fields of luminous and vibrating colors. One step further and he would have been here.
What was behind those works belonging to the short period in 1989 - 1990? Maybe they represented a conclusion drawn from the artistic landscape which opened up when he moved to New York and came close to phenomena within the second and third chapters of 20th century western abstract art. Abstract expressionism, Rothko’s disembodied chromatic sensations, minimalism, field painting, postmodern strategies etc. It is hard to say. At one early point, he had turned from photography to painting in order to get to grips with those elements that photography builds on: light, time and space. That might also have been part of the picture.
In any case, ten years ago Tilman turned on his heel and made a wide detour in his exploration. He went back to a space where vertical stripes, sometimes white and sometimes black, are criss-crossed by streams of transparent paint and of microelements. The paintings do not include simulacra but they appeal to the preconceived notions of our intimate knowledge of nature in the way the colors and forms produce thickets of dusk and glades of light. Seen from today’s station on the road they appear as a hesitation, a second thought about what step to take next.
Pondering on this deferment, I remember a correspondence between two of the key figures from the first chapter of European abstract art. When I was a young art critic, it told me something about the genesis of abstract art, that nothing comes from nothing and that the course followed is not always straight. I quote from memory.
Theo van Doesburg had found out that he could transfer his abstractions into closed, colored rectangles. He wrote enthusiastically to his friend Mondrian that this was the future and that he had to join him. You are probably right, Mondrian replied. But I am for the moment here in Scheveningen, painting and observing the movement of the waves coming in from the sea. I am not yet ready to take that step.
The irony was that Mondrian was far ahead of Doesburg on the way towards neoplasticism and De Stijl, which they founded together in those years during World War I. His plus-and-minus paintings represent a detour, which would lead forward.
I would say that the long way round which Tilman followed in the nineties - of course the detour is my arbitrary explanation after the event - meant a deeper involvement in the notions of time and movement. Günter Fruhtrunk, his teacher at the art academy in Munich, represents his link to the early chapters of abstract art. Fruhtrunk commuted between Munich and a Paris where he had been the friend of Hans Arp and belonged to the circles around the Galerie Denise René. He was in fact a rigorous theorist. In a lecture to his students he condensed his thoughts about time and movement.
"Consciousness is construction. Let us deal with construction according to time, according to the identity of time and experience. We value quality higher than quantity. Time will often prove to be qualitative, which means it is described in the first person. We will always be aware of that; and a painter or a musician, every creative individual, knows the fact that he himself is time; he does not explain time; in reality he includes himself as time in his description of an experience. Time is an experience in the first person of a non-material movement. An experience of a passing movement. It is not about a passing experience, but it is about pure experience of a passing-by, an immediate passing over and an immediate coming. An immediate past as a continuum stays, and that is also its content, because content there is."
If postmodernism within visual art means anything to me and not just a general relativisation and an attitude of anything goes, it means deconstruction. In taking modernism to pieces, it very much puts the tradition of abstract art under fire. But deconstruction took place also within the continuation of this tradition, a descent from high-flown notions to a spirit of analysis and delimitation. It is in this context that I perceive Tilman’s dealing with colors, light and time as a movement. He has renounced the dramaturgy of high tensions and interactions between prismatic colors. He uses low-key, somewhat odd or commonplace tints, which - though they are filled with light - produce an extremely intimate interaction when they are brought close to each other. The optical/symbolic function of colors redefining colors in a musical interplay is kept down. Each color more or less keeps its own identity. We are close to color as an object. This impression is of course enhanced by the fact that, in most cases, each color has its own panel and in that sense is an object.
Working with new materials was a circumstance that contributed to new solutions. First Tilman changed from acrylic on nettle cloth to acrylic with pigments and polyurethane on cotton and then to oil lacquer on panels of MDF-board. His exhibition in 1997 at the Petra Bungert Gallery in New York constitutes a new and significant step towards his work today. Bands of light and strings of bright colors intersect those paintings. When looked into as pieces of pictorial space, they appear to be about transparency and movement. But they are to be perceived as one-color entities, in that sense as monochromes. The main movement from one point to another, the immediate past staying as a continuum, occurs not so much between the pictorial elements within the canvases as between the canvases, between for instance a bright and a dark canvas or a red and a blue one. Tilman wanted the viewer to look upon them as a whole, as installations interacting with space. The interaction between them as well as the interaction between them and the space is the content.
Time as movement, as a passing-by, is still very present in his work. It is manifested in the panels Tilman terms Constellations. Small, brightly colored squares at the border of the panel function as the tenons of the carpenter. They fit together with the tenons of another piece. The separate panels/works are visually kept together. Time as a continuum passes through them. Similarly, we may also get a clearer understanding of what Tilman demonstrates with the offer to let us put together a composition from different color panels. Time is hidden in a very concrete sense in these compositions. The panels do not share the simultaneity of a canvas. They have moved together, edge to edge.
Reflecting upon aspects of Tilman’s work which did not immediately attract me, I have come to value his low-key, down-to-earth continuation of a personal, highly spiritual adventure concerned with color’s potential transcendence to pure light. Moving towards the future, there are promises and protean proems. This is the place where Tilman is now: one of the possible places to take abstract art at this point in time and in this part of the world. When all has been done.
Kristian Romare
in: Tilman - Transforms & Constellations
catalogue, 48 pages, 16 color reproductions
ISBN 92-990006-0-3 D 2000-9114-1
published by the artist & CCNOA, Brussels (B) 2000